Aleksei Novichkov

Senior Product Designer · currently in Belgrade, Serbia

Professional Summary

Senior Product Designer focused on productivity and collaboration software. I have 13 years of experience designing SaaS products. My work includes a task manager, CRM, and accounting software. I excel at designing tools people rely on every day. I enjoy simplifying complex features to create a clear, effective user experience.

I am also a frontend developer, which allows me to design solutions that are realistic to implement and polished in the browser. This enables seamless design handoff, close collaboration with engineers, and consistently high-quality UX in production.

Employment History

Product Designer at Buddy.ai

Jun 2022 – Apr 2025 (2 years 10 months)
Voice-based AI English tutor for kids, designed as an interactive, game-like experience.

Parental Experience

  • Onboarding Optimization: I led a comprehensive redesign of the parental onboarding process, resulting in significant improvements in trial and purchase conversion rates.
  • Compliance and Certification: Ensured COPPA compliance in the mobile app UI and helped obtain kidSAFE certification.
  • Paywall Experimentation: Conducted extensive A/B testing on paywall designs, learning from both successful and unsuccessful tests.
  • Complete Website Redesign: Completely redesigned the company website, aligning it with different audience segments (English as a foreign language, Early learning program, and Speech therapy). This new structure boosted traffic and enabled more effective marketing experiments.

Kids’ Experience

  • Voice interaction engagement & clarity: I designed a prominent, playful “Magic of Voice” indicator that clearly signals listening states, reduces confusion about turn-taking, and makes voice input feel safe and inviting. To reinforce this behavior, we linked immediate rewards to spoken responses.
  • Retention improvement: Integrated rewards into daily dialogues to encourage habitual use and improve short- and long-term retention.

Product Design Lead at Finolog

Mar 2016 – Jan 2022 (5 years 11 months)
Accounting platform for small businesses with automated bank imports, cash flow forecasting, and financial reporting.

Product Design

  • As the sole designer in the early stages, I defined the product’s UX, UI, and visual language, and led it from an MVP to a mature SaaS tool.
  • Planned and conducted multiple in-depth UX research studies. These insights shaped core product flows, reduced onboarding friction, and informed several roadmap cycles.
  • Hired, mentored, and led a junior product designer, building Finolog’s first in-house design function.
  • Redesigned key flows to help users reach their “a-ha moment” faster — particularly the journey from data aggregation to generating their first Cashflow report.
  • User onboarding: Interviewed newly converted customers, identified their goals and early struggles, and created onboarding guides (using Intercom Product Tours and custom UI) to support activation and reduce support load.
  • Created the initial help-center content and product explanations before a support team existed, giving users a reliable foundation for self-service onboarding.

Frontend Development

  • Contributed hands-on as a frontend developer (Vue.js) for several product features during the early startup stage.
  • Built and maintained the Finolog marketing website using Nuxt.

Communication & Marketing Design

  • Owned visual direction across product and marketing.
  • Supervised freelance designers and maintained visual consistency.
  • Designed the main website, multiple promo pages, and visual communication materials.
  • Helped launch numerous educational initiatives, including courses teaching financial accounting for small businesses; educational programs for financial consultants using Finolog.

Megaplan

Leading B2B SaaS platform in the Russian market for CRM, task, and project management used by small and mid-sized companies.

Lead Product Designer

Nov 2014 – Mar 2016 (1 year 5 months)

  • I have completed the design of the new Megaplan mobile app, which the previous lead designer had started.
  • Hired and mentored two designers at the company.
  • Before leaving, I developed a design concept for Megaplan’s evolution, which became the basis for the service’s current design.

Product Designer

Jan 2012 – Nov 2014 (2 years 11 months)

Megaplan CRM redesign

  • Redesigned core CRM modules (Clients, Deals), contributing to the launch of a modernized UI used by thousands of SMB teams.
  • Simplified complex CRM workflows by reducing redundant settings, roles, and edge cases that had accumulated over years of feature growth.
  • Collaborated closely with product managers and engineers to evolve the CRM while maintaining backward compatibility for existing customers.

Zettaplan task-manager (initially Megaplan 2)

  • Contributed to the design of Zettaplan, a next-generation collaboration platform focused on tasks, projects, and contextual communication.
  • Redesigned the core task experience multiple times, optimizing for high-frequency actions such as commenting, delegation, subtasks, mentions, and file sharing.
  • Helped shape an Inbox-centric workflow, enabling users to interact with tasks, discussions, and notifications in a single, unified view.
  • Designed a permission and access model based on company structure, including inheritance rules that balanced simplicity and privacy needs.
  • Reduced a complex role system to three clear permission levels, lowering cognitive load for admins and end users.
  • Worked on information architecture and navigation, including column-based layouts, tree views, and focus management between lists and detail views.
  • Contributed to a reusable components library, improving UI consistency and development speed across the product.
  • Partnered closely with engineers, frequently refining interactions, micro-UX details, and UI polish directly during implementation.

Details

Belgrade, Serbia
novichkov.alexey@gmail.com
Portfolio
LinkedIn
GitHub

Education

Voronezh State Technical University
Diploma in “Information Systems and Technologies”
2002–2007

Languages

English (Professional Working)
Russian (Native)

Skills

UI Design
User Experience Design
Prototiping: Figma, HTML/JS
Usability Testing
User Research
Frontent Development
Web Design

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